


York and Amsterdam

by liliaeth



Category: New Amsterdam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-15
Updated: 2008-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:25:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1636361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liliaeth/pseuds/liliaeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Growing up with Amsterdam</p>
            </blockquote>





	York and Amsterdam

**Author's Note:**

> Much much thanks to Htbthomas for help with the betaing.  
> Written for Zai

 

 

"I loved that woman. I loved her more than I loved life itself. But she wasn't the one. And yet, I loved her and I was hers."

*******

Graduation from the police academy was the one thing I thought would fulfill my life once and for all. I had my life all planned out by the time I was seven. I knew then, even before I knew everything, that I wanted to be just like John. It seems silly now. But I really looked up to that man.

His name was John Amsterdam. He was a police detective and to a child's eyes he was the coolest thing ever. He was my hero, my superhero. He was the father I never had, my big brother and my role model all mixed together in one mysterious package. To me, he was family. I never realized how right I was. 

John came into my life at a time when I needed someone to look up to the most. My father had left my mother a year before and my mom was working two jobs just to pay the rent and keep our heads above water. He was my grandfather's best friend. Mom figured that he saw Grandpa as a bit of a mentor figure and since he kept Grandpa from being alone, she soon learned to appreciate him. 

Not that Grandpa was really all that alone. Whenever he had a date, or just wanted to head out with some of his friends, he'd ask John to look after me. Grandpa would sit me on one of the barstools and tell me to be a good boy for John, so that he wouldn't leave me on the street to go chase a bad guy. John rarely did that though. He might complain whenever Grandpa forced me on him, but he did it with a smile and without a hint of fire behind his words. 

And sure, I found out that hanging out with a cop had its downsides; especially a cop like John Amsterdam who seemed to have a problem with the concept downtime. Most of the time, John would take me along on his cases. Before long I was a regular guest at the police department, and John would ask one of them to keep an eye on me if he had to go do something that wasn't suited for little ears. 

All the cops knew me by name and many of them would get me candy or hot cocoa. I'd just turn the most adorable eyes possible on them, and they'd be like putty under my hands. John would come back to find me reading a new comic, or eating a candy bar and he'd wink before making a show out of reprimanding whomever was supposed to look after me for giving in to me. 

It never stopped anyone from doing the same thing the next time John had to leave me behind.

Mom would complain. But she didn't stop dropping me off at Grandpa's bar. Mom never told John to stay away from me and after a while she'd just call John and ask him where we were before she drove to Grandpa's bar. By Christmas time, she invited John to dinner, a year later she invited him and his partner, Eva. All through dinner, John kept looking at her. He'd look away whenever she noticed, but he didn't stop staring. Eva never seemed to mind so I figured...

I know it was silly. But I wanted a father and Mom had been on several failed dates. I liked John and it seemed like he liked her too, so why shouldn't they be together right? So before the night was over I went up to John and asked him, "Why don't you and my mom get married?"

I've never seen a man choke on soup before, nor did I ever see anyone spit as far as John did that day, not before or since. John started coughing and wheezing and Grandpa kept slapping him on the back to keep him from dying. And the whole time Grandpa was laughing as if I'd just said the most ridiculous thing imaginable. 

I felt like an idiot. Mom had a look in her eyes - I'm not sure what it meant. Almost as if the joke was on her. But neither of us understood why. I never brought it up again, and neither did anyone else. But it took a while to get Mom to warm up to John again. 

I thought John could do everything. I thought he was immortal. Can you see what a smart kid I was? In my eyes he could do no wrong. Grandpa would laugh when I said that to him. "Nobody is perfect," he'd tell me, "especially John Amsterdam." He was trying to keep me from getting disappointed.

Other people thought he was crazy, a good cop, a damn good cop, but crazy. He was functional, went to the AA every week. But you could notice the crazy. He'd make those little references, several hints about his age, about things he'd seen. He knew more about New York than anyone else I knew.

Sometimes John would tell you something about speakeasies as if he'd actually been there. This one time he'd talk about some small restaurant that hadn't been there in fifty years or the next he'd go on and on about a circus that stopped performing before he could have ever been born. 

His partner would shake it off when you asked her about it. As a kid I ate it up. He was my crazy Uncle John. And I'm afraid to say, my best friend. I spent more time with him than I did with my own grandfather. I loved my Grandpa. I loved being with him. But Grandpa couldn't take me to the places that John could and he wasn't nearly as cool. Not to the child I was. 

But then Grandpa died.

I was about seventeen at the time. He had a heart attack. Just some stupid heart attack as if he were just any other guy. The doctors said he must have sat down in his chair, fallen asleep and never even realized he was dying. John was there for the funeral and looked as broken up about it as me and my mother and I just couldn't help thinking... What is he doing here?

I got angry, so damn angry. 

What right did he have to be there? What right did he have to force himself into my grandfather's life like that, to impose himself on me?

This was my grandfather, not his, my grandpa who was lying in a coffin, about to be put into the ground. What right did he have to act as if he were part of the family? Grandpa was ours, what right did some stupid white guy have to act sad as if Grandpa belonged to him as much as he did to us?

Why would I let him act as if he were a part of the family when he'd been coming in between us for all these years? It was like a light went on and shone on all those years where he'd been a wedge between me and the man I should have been looking up to, my grandfather. I'd been blind not to see how much time I had spent with John, time that I could have been spending with my grandfather instead. 

If I had, I might have been there in time. I might have been able to save Grandpa, or to at least hold his hand instead of fishing with John, somewhere in the woods, like some white country boy. 

I just hit him. I slapped him in the face, he didn't even try to stop me. I'm ashamed of what I did, but I still did it. I hit him and would have hit him again if my mom hadn't shouted my name. She sounded so ashamed and I stared at my hands and at John's face. Tears fell down from my eyes and John... He apologized.

That was the worst of it, he apologized, said he was all right, but there was that sad look in his eyes, a pain and understanding of loss that tore into me and made me yell even louder. 

Eva held his hand throughout it all and I remember how she clenched her fists. It seemed to take a supreme force of will from her just to keep standing there instead of defending John's honor. She didn't even give me a chance to apologize. Not that I would have, not then. I was so sure I was right.

We met again at the bar, while John was emptying his rooms behind the bar and Mom and I came to pick up Grandpa's stuff from his apartment on the first floor. John was holding a box and one of them slipped out of his hands as he was carrying it to his car. The carton cracked and it slipped open to show a bunch of books, journals. He was gone before I noticed that one of the books had fallen on the ground. Mom picked it up and just added it to the box. She said something about dropping it off at his new place later. But I wasn't listening. I just sat there on one of the barstools holding an empty glass and wondering what was going to happen to the place now. 

The stairs cracked as I went up to the apartment. The light didn't work. Grandpa had been late with his electric bill and Mom didn't bother to pay for it, just to empty the place. She threw open the shades, leaving a few glimpses of light into the room for the first time in months. 

And yet... there were glasses and dishes still waiting in the sink. A book lay on the salon table, a coaster keeping track of his place. I was careful as I picked it up and closed it. Mom pinched her nose against the stench. I couldn't help but feeling the same way. It felt like the cigarette smoke had drenched into the ceilings, the furniture as well as the wallpaper. Mom used to complain about that, but in the end, she'd given up and just let Grandpa have his little pleasures. She hired a cleaner for him, but the poor woman barely made headway against the filth of it all. 

Mom started working, grabbing everything and anything that was loose and throwing it in a box. I just stood there for a moment before I grabbed some of the frames on the never-used fireplace and threw them into the box. Anything to be gone before the landlord came in and started complaining about the rent. One of he frames hit the floor, breaking the glass. I grabbed it up and threw it in the box with the others. Mom picked up the glass and threw it in a trash bag. I didn't see why she should bother. Not like we had any hope of getting Grandpa's deposit back to begin with. The place started to seem empty before we were halfway through and I was almost starting to enjoy the smell. It was the last proof that Grandpa had lived there and I couldn't let go of that.

My mom's boyfriend showed up to help us take out the furniture, most of it went on a one-way trip to the Salvation Army, but I grabbed hold of Grandpa's lamp before she could add it to the load. That night when I turned it on, I found out that the lamp was broken and it would probably have to be thrown away. I just let it stand there on the desk, refusing to admit the fact. 

I went downstairs and found Mom going through Grandpa's personal stuff. Clothes, most of which would end up at the Salvation Army as well, frames, pictures...

She was removing most of the frames and adding the pictures to an album. I sat down next to her to help out. It was almost fun doing that, talking about Grandpa, looking at the pictures, seeing him with some of the customers from the bar, some famous people he'd met over his life. And some pictures with Grandma and Mom when they were younger. 

When I reached down again for another one of the frames, I yelped and realized I'd cut myself on the broken frame. Mom grabbed a bandage and covered my hand before I could bleed all over the pictures. Or so she said. I was more careful to pick up the frame again and looked at the image of the woman in the picture. She looked beautiful. 

"Who's that?" I asked Mom. Mom picked up the picture and carefully started removing the glass. 

"That's my grandmother. Lily Rae York. Dad used to tell me stories about her and Grandpa."

She gave me the picture and I realized now that half of the picture had been hiding, folded up out of sight. There was a man in the picture. A white man. He was standing next to my great-grandmother and for a moment I wondered what he was doing there in the first place. 

"She married a white man," my mom continued, "in a time when doing so wasn't as accepted as it is today. Her father disowned her and a lot of places wouldn't let her enter from the front door. But she still stayed with him, married him and had his son. Your grandfather. They must have loved one another a great deal."

I stared at the picture and looked at the back, there was some text there. `Lily Rae Brown and John York, 1941.'

I couldn't believe my eyes. The man looked just like John Amsterdam. 

It seemed so impossible that I instantly came up with reasons for this. Maybe my great-grandfather had had other children, and John was simply related that way. But if that were the case, then why didn't Grandpa just say that John was a part of the family? It couldn't have been shame, since he'd never been ashamed about John in any other way. 

I started looking through the other pictures, hoping to find him again. And there he was, over and over again. John Amsterdam at a party, John Amsterdam in a uniform, John Amsterdam at a speakeasy, John Amsterdam sitting next to Grandpa, teaching him how to play the piano. 

Mom hadn't even noticed. I tried looking for any proof, anything in one of the other boxes and I found the book, the red book. It was a journal. A journal that held the sins and apologies that seemed to talk about sins committed by a man from the nineteenth century. But I recognized the writing. Maybe John was just writing a book? 

But I couldn't fool myself. It all just made too much sense. 

So one day I stood there, right outside the police station, waiting for him to leave. Eva saw me and glared at me, then I saw John, he looked broken. I hoped he hadn't gone back to drinking.

"Corey."

There were a thousand different meanings, just in the way he said my name. I wasn't remotely sure how to respond to it.

"I need to talk to you." But how to start this, could I talk about something like this in front of his partner, did she know?

"I'll see you later," he told her. She seemed about to refuse, but he looked at her, his eyes begging her to let him handle me. She touched his hand for a second and left for her car. 

I looked at him and noticed the setting of his face, his nose, desperate to find the signs that I missed, the resemblance. I was so unsure of how to do this, so I just handed him the notebook. "You left this at the bar."

He just stared at it and started moving, I followed in step. Back to the way we had been for the past decade. Just an easy walk, as if we were best friends again. 

"Are you my great-grandfather?"

The words just slipped out, even saying them sounded ridiculous. I wanted to apologize just for saying something that preposterous. But he didn't laugh, he didn't even chuckle. Instead he just nodded and said, "Yes, I am."

"How? It's impossible, isn't it?"

And I remembered that first day, when he told me he couldn't die; my own personal superhero. My grandfather's father turned to me and started laughing. "It's a long story." And it was.

So now I stand here, about to join the police force. In a few years I might be a detective. John sure was rooting for me, along with my mom. 

"I loved that woman," he'd told me about his wife, my great-grandmother. "I loved her more than I loved life itself. But she wasn't the one. And yet, I loved her and I was hers."

And I look back at Eva standing at his side, still. I watch her hold his hand. And I pray for their sake.

The End 

 


End file.
